Hey Riddle Riddle, The Bat In The Middle

Just like the Riddler, me. We have the same first name, so I'm halfway there. Next I plan to commit overly complicated crimes, although since I have no nemesis, there's no real point.

It's no great secret that I'm a fan of comics, and although my main graphic literature of choice is normally of the Marvel persuasion, I was quite interested in Batman: Arkham Asylum when I saw it in a trailer. My main attraction was that the Joker looked like a fantastic character, with all his craziness and fantastic voice work. I wasn't a big fan of Dark Knight Joker, but that's just me.

I picked up the game fairly cheap second hand over Christmas and played a little bit of it, fighting random goons and having fun introducing peoples' noses to Batman's shoes. But this time around I decided to knuckle down and get to work putting the Joker behind bars and solving the mystery of Arkham Island.

Batman is a well structured game. It merges story and gameplay better than most I've seen. The combat system is fantastic, and although I might be useless at stringing together combos, it's easy to use and when you really get to grips with it and are knocking down enemy after enemy, it feels well made. Having said that, I'd love to have a go at the original rhythm action beat-em-up style combat. Just for a laugh.

The riddle system was funny and I really enjoyed looking for the answers to some of them, although others were clearly designed to show off the locations that the developers had made. This said, this is exactly the sort of thing The Riddler might do himself, a point well made in one of my favourite podcasts. A part of the game that disappointed me was the lack of any really good boss fights. None of them were particularly bad, but for a superhero game I expected some better showdowns. Maybe in the sequel.

Batman: Arkham Asylum. Great game, great story, great combat, great voice acting. Buy it.

Finally, wrote a piece for the Newb Review the other day, which I haven't for a while. Read it soon mind, because it's a time sensitive piece of semi-satire, which sounds very pretentious. Just go read it.

See y'all when I next sign in!